


Reckless and Humble

by ridiculoustales



Category: Durarara!!
Genre: Alternate Universe - Soulmates, Canon-Typical Violence, Denial of Feelings, Enemies to Lovers, Fights, First Dates, First Kiss, Flirting, M/M, Major Character Injury, More tags to be added!, Non-Explicit Sex, Sexual Tension, Soulmate-Identifying Marks, Soulmates, Stabbing
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-02-13
Updated: 2018-08-15
Packaged: 2019-03-17 14:37:52
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 5
Words: 11,915
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13661055
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ridiculoustales/pseuds/ridiculoustales
Summary: Shizuo has pushed away the thought of soulmates ever since he was young, and has more or less resigned himself to being one of the few without one.  But after he sees Izaya stabbed by a stranger, his entire denial of this part of his life is altered to the point of confusion, and he thinks that what he sees must be a mistake.And Izaya is fairing no better.





	1. First

**Author's Note:**

> Note: I rated this Teen and Up but depending on how the non-explicit "sex scene" turns out (I haven't written it as of yet), it may change to Mature later.

Of all the things Shizuo thinks about in the day, soulmate marks are not one of them.  He doesn’t try to date, or attempt to disgrace himself more than he already does by going to “speed flashing” events, and in all the 23 years he’s existed, he hasn’t spared any real effort at all into finding his soulmate.

His mother has said that hers is on her shoulder, his father’s underneath his eye.  Shinra supposedly has one on his neck, in an ancient language Celty claims only she would be able to understand, but Celty does not have one herself.  Shizuo always finds the two of them interesting, especially because he doesn’t acquaint himself with too many people who have soulmates with different native languages.  Tom claims he always feels like there’s something weird on his wrist, so that must be where his is, but Shizuo never really spared much thought to the idea when the comment was first made.

They can’t see their soulmate marks.  No one but their soulmate can, unless their soulmate is dead, and even then only that person can see their mark.  But for the most part this has never bothered Shizuo.  He first heard about a case of a person not having a mark when he was 9, and he remembers a brief worry he had over whether or not he could be one of those cases.  But then his mother had reminded him that if he was really that worried about it, it meant that he wanted a soulmate, and in turn that meant he had to have a mark.

But even a thought like that seems silly now, after the minimal number of romantic encounters he’s had over the years.  His first one was in his second year of middle school, when a girl in his grade—a transfer student—had taken a liking to him and had asked if he wanted to go on a date with her.  Shizuo had said yes because she was cute and he thought she was nice and a girl had never asked him out before, and she hadn’t ever seen or heard about his monstrous strength.  But on their way to the restaurant they had agreed to eat lunch at on a sunny Saturday afternoon, Shizuo was jumped by a group of punks a year above him in the alley next to the restaurant, and for the first and last time the girl saw what Shizuo was really like.

She had run from the scene and Shizuo went home with a bloody lip and a bruise across his knuckles and a self-loathing that wouldn’t begin to soothe until months later.

He never saw the girl again.

Then when he made it high school, he got asked out in his first year, this time by a girl who didn’t seem to believe the rumors that had so carelessly floated around about Shizuo after he got into a fight in the courtyard on his first day.  She called him sweet and had a nice laugh and it was the first time Shizuo thought that someone might actually be his soulmate.

But then she was there when the group of thugs attacked Shizuo in the field, and Shizuo remembers her frowning and taking a step back and walking away with a pace too quick to be anything but rejection.

And then that’s when he met Izaya.

He was in a bad mood already, from the thugs and the rush of anger that came with them and the immediate knowing that he had screwed up when the girl he thought could be his soulmate took off without even a single word.

So when the bright taunting of those slow claps came ringing in his ears just moments after she disappeared, it was easier than anything ever before to turn around with pure fury for whoever dared give that kind of applause to him then.

It wasn’t even that he had the taunting voice that screamed “asshole.”  Or that he had a smirk that cut through every part of self-hatred that Shizuo had gathered up until this point, or even the blood red of his eyes wandering over Shizuo with such ease that made it seem as though the two of them had known each other for a long time.  It was that he was there when it happened, when Shizuo lost what he thought at the time must have been his _one_ , and that the first thing Izaya thought to do was clap.

And the words had just tumbled out of his mouth: “You piss me off.”

After that, Shizuo threw out the idea of a soulmate completely and let himself drown in the idea of being alone for the rest of his life.

It was easy to forget about things like that when he was spending a large portion of his free time chasing someone, anyway.

And there’s no exception of that this time, either.

“You’re slow today, Shizu-chan,” the someone is taunting now, skipping backwards as Shizuo swings a stop sign around in attempt to make a hit on him.  “Have you injured yourself?”

“Shut up, _Izaya-kun_ ,” Shizuo snarls, and swings the stop sign again.  Izaya dodges once more, his eyes still lidded in what always seems like boredom to Shizuo, contrasting sharply with the red glinting madness in them.

“You’re quite the smooth talker,” Izaya says, pushing his feet off against the wall of the alley to propel himself behind Shizuo.  He feels a light sting in his back and grits his teeth to the appended anger that surges through him.  “Maybe you should write a how-to book on the topic.”

Shizuo doesn’t respond to that one.  He just picks up his pace as Izaya takes off running down the alley, where it’s spilling out into a side street he hadn’t known was here until now.  He looks around once and then gives his attention back over to where Izaya is jumping over a traffic cone to skid himself onto the road crossing into the one Shizuo is standing on.

Shizuo follows without missing a step, and skids to a halt when he sees Izaya standing at the end of the side street, leaning against a wall, knife pointed out in front of him and a smirk seeping into all the lines of his features.

“Had enough of this game yet?” he hisses.  “I hope so, I need to go home and continue my work that you so rudely interrupted.”

“Maybe if you hadn’t set foot _here_ ,” Shizuo growls, “we wouldn’t have a problem right now.”

“Set foot where, Shizu-chan?  In Ikebukuro or just in the world in general?”

“Both,” Shizuo is snarling, but Izaya’s eyes suddenly go wide, and he’s stumbling forward and lowering the arm that holds his knife before Shizuo can even let his raised foot hit hit the ground.

He cuts his gaze to behind Izaya’s strange behavior, where a hooded man is holding a bloody knife and cackling in a manner that seems to hiss his breath between his teeth.  He notices Shizuo looking at him and nods, holding up the knife as if to justify why he’s there.

And then he rounds the corner and disappears, before Shizuo can catch up and wonder what to do with him.  But then he’s gone, and Shizuo lets himself look back to Izaya, who’s fallen to his knees on the ground.

He’s still holding his knife, but as Shizuo sees the drip of blood fall from his side, there’s a clank of metal against the ground, and Shizuo instinctively looks back to Izaya’s hand now empty of any defense he proved of himself before.

The first thing he thinks when he sees it is a split-second wonder of when Izaya got a tattoo, but then there’s a sudden and rapid-fire surge of _something_ in his body, and all at once he realizes that the mark on the inside line of Izaya’s left wrist is the first kanji to Shizuo’s own name—静—black and brilliant and he knows immediately that it’s a soulmate mark.

Izaya collapses then, and Shizuo is brought back to the moment feeling more confused than he ever has been in his entire life.

It’s a soulmate mark, it’s half of Shizuo’s name, it’s on _Izaya_ , and Shizuo chokes on a sudden breath and doesn’t know what to do.  He lets the stop sign in his hand collapse against the pavement in echo to Izaya’s motion, and takes a step toward Izaya’s unmoving bleeding body and realizes that he’s shaking, for a reason so far unknown that he can’t even begin to spare moments to contemplate it.

Izaya is lying belly to the ground, face turned sideways and his features slack with unconsciousness, blood from the wound on his right side making for what would look like a dead body if Shizuo didn’t know for a fact that he’s alive, as he places a hand on his back and feels the faint up-and-down of his lungs still working.

It takes several moments for Shizuo to think of something to do.  He’s so confused that he wonders for a split second when Izaya is going to get up and explain, but right after the thought passes through his mind, Shizuo yanks his hand away from Izaya’s back and brings his phone out in the open from its place in his pocket.

It takes a bit of effort to steady his hands into dialing Celty.

“Celty,” he says when she picks up.  “I need you to come to…”  He pauses for a long moment, trying to figure out in a daze where they are right now, but Celty doesn’t hang up.  “I need you to come to that alley next to that smoothie place we went to last week.  Go down there and take a left and we’re on that side street.  Hurry.”  And he hangs up, letting his phone drop from his shaking hand next to Izaya’s face.

Celty shows up much quicker than Shizuo thought she would, but he supposes that the time feels like much less since he’s been too preoccupied with the dazed feeling he still can’t understand as to why it’s gripping him so.

 _“What happened?!”_ she shows Shizuo as she rushes up to where he’s crouched next to Izaya.

“We were fighting and some guy came up behind him and stabbed him,” Shizuo explains, with surprising focus that shocks himself.

_“He’s bleeding quite a bit.  Help me get him on the bike.”_

Shizuo nods, and stands with a brief wonder of if he’s going to fall from shaky legs.  But his legs aren’t shaking and he stands with more ease than he’s done anything in the last passing minutes.  He picks up Izaya easily, ignoring the blood soaking into his uniform as Celty wraps her shadow around his wound and helps Shizuo sit all three of them on the bike comfortably.

When they get to Shinra’s, Izaya is immediately taken to another room, and Celty comes back a few minutes later with a towel she explains is to clean off the blood from Shizuo’s uniform.  He thanks her but ends up simply gripping it in his hands instead.

 _“Are you alright?”_ she asks, and Shizuo has to drag his eyes to the PDA slowly to be able to read it.

“Yeah,” Shizuo tells her.  Celty doesn’t seem convinced, and goes to type something else into the device.  “Kind of,” he appends, and Celty stops the rapid-fire movement of her fingers.  “When Izaya dropped his knife after he got stabbed, I saw a mark on his wrist.”

He sees Celty stiffen in the corner of his eye.  He knows she knew what it meant immediately.  He would look at her more forwardly but his gaze is unfocused on the coffee table in front of him and he doesn’t feel like exerting the extra focus it would take to look at her.

“It was the first kanji of my name, just like everyone says they are.”  He pauses.  “At least for people who have spoken Japanese since they were born,” he appends, with a chuckle he doesn’t feel, and because he knows Shinra’s is in Celty’s language.

“There was that feeling when I saw it, too,” he says.  “You know, the one everyone says happens when you see the mark, so you won’t be able to miss it and everything.”  He doesn’t know why he’s explaining it to her—everyone knows the stories.  He pauses again.  “Does that mean I have one?” he adds quietly, his gaze still unfocused on the table.

He sees Celty duck her helmet down in the corner of his eye, and then her PDA is coming up in front of his gaze and his eyes are forced to focus on the words in front of him with the sudden drawing movement.

_“You’re wondering what to do?”_

Shizuo nods.  “I hate him.  I don’t know how this happened.”

Celty types again.  _“Do you really hate him?”_

Shizuo frowns and brings up a growl from his throat, but it feels more refreshing than anything.  “Of course I do,” he says.  “The flea’s an asshole.  There’s no way in hell I can be his _soulmate_ , of all things.”

_“...Maybe you should give it a chance.  If there’s a mark, it has to mean something.”_

Shizuo growls again and rubs his temples with his hand, despite the lack of a true headache.  “There’s gotta be some mistake; maybe I was seeing things or something.  I’ve seen his wrist about a billion times in all the years we’ve known each other.  How could I have missed it before?”

Celty seems to hesitate before showing Shizuo her message.  _“It could be one of those rare cases.”_

Shizuo frowns.  “Which one?”  He watches her type an answer for a moment, and it comes to him.  “Are you talking about the two-way hate thing?”

She nods.  Shizuo’s features ease into disbelief and he ruffles a hand through his hair.  “He got fucking injured and I saw it,” he says.  “Fuck, it can’t be that.

“…Can it?”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I've always wanted to do a soulmate au!! It's kind of a cliche idea, but I thought it would be a cool challenge to try it out myself with the infamous pair that hate each other so much. I can't guarantee a posting schedule yet, but hopefully soon I will. For now, I can promise a new chapter by next Monday. Hope you enjoyed! :D  
> (EDIT: I'm unfortunately really busy this weekend, so I don't have time to write the next chapter. :/ But I promise the next time I do have some extra time to do so I will, so I can get it posted as soon as possible!!)  
> (SECOND EDIT: I've been having a lot of tests, etc. lately and I've been needing taking a break from doing some of my normal stuff on the weekends because I've been so stressed lately, so I'll be updating this the week of my spring break, which starts next Saturday. Thank you so much for being patient, and I'm sorry I've not started a schedule for this yet!)


	2. One Side

Izaya wakes up with a dull searing pain in his side, and wonders vaguely in the first few seconds of drowsiness what’s causing it.  And then he remembers, and ends up chuckling to himself at the fact that Shizuo didn’t kill him in his biggest moment of weakness.

“So the monster didn’t kill me…” he says to himself, noting with a scowl how hoarse his voice sounds.

He lies there in silence for a long time, letting himself stare at the mundane of the ceiling until he hears Shinra’s voice rising to his usual ecstatic range outside the door.  Izaya assumes he’s in the living room.

He ignores the sound for a while, until he hears his name, and turns his head toward the door to give over a little more unneeded attention than just his ears.

“-knew you two would get along, but I didn’t think it would be like _this_!” he hears Shinra say.  He wonders what he’s talking about with Celty.  Perhaps she’s fooled around on her beloved doctor.  Izaya smirks with the thought even as he knows it can’t be true.

“There is no _this_ ,” he hears someone growl, and all at once the smirk that had been coloring Izaya’s face drops into an expression of horror.  “Are you sure he wasn’t faking it or something, trying to mess with me?  Did you check his wrist?”

Izaya regains his composure enough to give a scowl to the plain white of the door, before allowing his head to turn back up to the ceiling, holding up both his hands to examine his wrists.  He doesn’t know what the monster is talking about.

“I didn’t overtly check it, no, but I think I would’ve noticed something like that if it was there—I’ve known him for a long time.”

He hears Shizuo give a frustrated groan, and lets his hands rest on the bed again as he shifts his head back in the direction of the living room.  “Then what the _fuck_ did I see?  There’s no way it could have been a mark, I’ve seen his wrist time and again and there’s _never_ -“

There’s a pause, and Izaya assumes Celty is showing him a message on her PDA.  But he only gives this a thought of very minimal passing time, as the words _no way it could have been a mark_ stick cruelly and sickly in his head, and even as he tries to find another angle, he knows that there’s no alternate way to interpret the phrase.

Before Izaya gets to hear any more of the conversation unbeknownst to the group of people outside the door, he’s clambering out of the bed, ignoring the screaming pain in his side, and just barely catches himself on the table next to the bed as Shinra suddenly bursts in, door swinging wide enough that Izaya can see both Shizuo and Celty staring at him from the couch.

He vaguely wonders what sound gave away that he was awake.

“Izaya?” Shinra says, in immediate shock.  “What are you doing?  You’ll rip out your stitches like that, lie back down.”

Izaya hisses as Shinra puts a hand on his shoulder, pressing down to coax him back into the bed.

“What the _fuck_ is that monster doing here?” Izaya spits, begrudgingly sitting back down on the bed and letting himself more or less be pushed back into a lying position.

Shinra blinks, and Izaya catches him glance at his left wrist, and says, “Shizuo-kun?  He’s the one who called Celty to help bring you here.”

“But why is he talking like he saw me with a _soulmate mark_?”  He chooses to ignore the contents of what Shinra said for now.

Shinra’s eyes widen.  “Oh, you heard all that?  Well, he _did_ see you with a soulmate mark, or he thinks he did anyway.  He said it’s on your wr-“

There’s a slam of a door in the other room, and Izaya realizes from the corner of the eye that Shizuo is gone from the couch.

“Oh, he left,” Shinra says, distraction drifting into his voice.

Izaya shrugs off Shinra’s grip still holding to his shoulder, and Shinra turns back to him with a headstrong look.

“Izaya,” he says.

Izaya freezes at the serious tone, but doesn’t let it show in his face.  Instead he allows a frown, the closest he can get to a scowl without hurting his already-pounding head.  “What?”

“Have you ever seen a marking on Shizuo-kun?”

Izaya’s face flames with heat, but it’s from fury more than anything else.  “Of course I haven’t seen a fucking _mark_ on him, he’s not my fucking soulmate!”

Shinra frowns.  “But he saw a mark, and I don’t think there’s any doubt about it.”

“We _hate_ each other Shinra!  And how in the world would we have gone this long without seeing the marks even if we _were_ soulmates?” Izaya hisses, feeling out of breath and pain flaring across his side, but chooses to ignore it the best he can.

“That’s the only explanation,” he responds with absolute calm.  “The two-way hate scenario.”

Izaya balks.  “You’re joking.”

“No, I-“

“You really believe that we could be soulmates?” Izaya shouts, even as he sees the edges of his vision going black.

“Yes, Izaya, I do.  Because it’s happened before, the two-way hate scenario.  If both soulmates feel true hatred toward each other, the marks are invisible to both until one gets seriously injured in front of the other.  Then the marks suddenly become visible to both parties.”

“You act like I don’t know the story already,” Izaya says, but his voice has grown soft with the weight of pain and oncoming unconsciousness, and he can’t tell if Shinra notices or not.

He assumes he does, because he feels a hand on his shoulder again, as Shinra sighs and says, “Calm down, Izaya.  You’ve just been stabbed, give yourself a little time before you start with all this.  You’re shaking.”

Izaya can feel the heavy weight of his breathing too, but he doesn’t say anything else.  Instead he closes his eyes, and Shinra’s hand disappears, and comes back within a few minutes, as Izaya’s breathing is slowing and he doesn’t feel like he’s going to pass out if he makes even the smallest of movements.

“Here, hold out your arm,” Shinra says, when Izaya opens his eyes again.  “I’ll give you some painkillers.”

Izaya holds out his upturned arm, and sighs.  Shinra isn’t giving out his usual jokes about him being an asshole or a terrible person or a reckless adrenaline junkie or about ruining his day with Celty, and it’s unnerving.  It’s disquieting enough that there’s even moderately good evidence that Shizuo is his _soulmate_ of all things, and Izaya decides just as he’s drifting back to sleep that he should just kill Shizuo and see for himself if there’s really a mark on his wrist or not.

However, it’s not the thought he has when he wakes again.

It’s night this time—he can see the dark of it from the window—and the first thing that hits him is the faint smell of cigarettes.  He turns his head slowly, allowing himself the dull movement after the overly quick ones from earlier, and immediately regrets it as he catches his eyes widening at the sight of Shizuo sitting in a chair next to the bed, sleeping with his arms crossed and head back against the chair.

He considers running, or maybe taking out his knife from the pocket of his coat hanging off to the front of the room and leaving the monster to show his fury  _alone_ when he wakes up—rather than when Izaya is here—but there is still uneasiness in his stomach and head from hours prior, and the thought of even sitting up sounds much too unbearable at the moment.

He just stares at Shizuo instead, as if that alone could keep him from waking up tonight, or the next day, or ever.  He briefly lets his eyes wander to look for a soulmate mark, but grits his teeth and frowns soon after.

It’s almost perfect timing, too, as Shizuo’s eyes flutter open and his mouth closes from the parted breathing it was giving in his sleep.  Izaya narrows his eyes as Shizuo wakes, and watches with an increasing feeling of dread as he shifts in the chair and catches Izaya staring at him from the bed.

“You’re awake,” is all he says, with calm Izaya didn’t know he was capable of.  He supposes the hoarseness of sleep is softening his voice, too.

“So are you,” Izaya says, with as much malice as he can manage.  He gives a twisted smirk.  “Have you come to kill me?”

Shizuo frowns, and Izaya sees his teeth bite against each other roughly.  “If I were here to kill you, don’t you think I would’ve done it while you were sleeping?”

Izaya shrugs.  “I don’t know, maybe you wanted a real fight to finish me off.”

“In _that_ condition?” Shizuo spits, but it’s lacking its usual edge.

Izaya shrugs again, but doesn’t say anything.

Shizuo shifts uncomfortably, uncrossing his arms and resting them on his knees, straightening his back and looking off to the side at the window in front of the bed.  Izaya follows his gaze, and lets his neck relax in a more natural position than it was in as he was staring at Shizuo.

They sit in silence for a long while, until Izaya dares a glance back at Shizuo, and sees that he’s staring at Izaya’s wrist, a not-quite scowl, not-quite frown on his face.

“What?” Izaya asks, which makes Shizuo jump and ease his expression as he swoops his gaze up to Izaya’s face.  “What are you looking at?”

Shizuo presses his lips together and frowns for real, this time.  “Nothing.”

Izaya lets it go, and allows silence to engulf them for a while again, sliding his eyes down to the floor, his eyes unfocused and his mind no better from the haze the painkillers are offering him.

“You…” Shizuo says after a while, very softly.  Izaya looks up again, but Shizuo is staring at his hands.  “You didn’t get a tattoo, did you?”

Izaya almost laughs, but he knows all too well how horribly real the situation is, and doesn’t.

“No,” he says, after a short pause.  “I didn’t.”  He pauses again, when Shizuo doesn’t move.  “Did you?”

Shizuo’s head whips up then, eyes so impossibly wide that Izaya almost laughs again.   _“What?”_

“I’m just kidding, Shizu-chan, I don’t see any mark on you,” Izaya says, a dark smirk on his lips.  Half of the laugh he’s been suppressing gets let out with his next words.  “Did you think I saw a soulmate mark?  On _you_?”

That gets to Shizuo, because the shocked expression drops, his face hardening into boiling rage, a much more familiar look in Izaya’s eyes, and he abruptly stands and stomps to the door of the room.

Izaya lets him go, the smirk still bleeding across his face.  The slam of the door behind Shizuo only causes it to twist more bitterly, and Izaya finds himself cackling before he can stop himself.

Maybe it’s possible to get rid of the monster without killing him, after all.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Chapter 2 is finally here!!!!! I'm so sorry for the long wait, but I badly needed the break. On top of all the tests and projects I've had going on, I just really burned out on writing chapter-style stuff and editing it, and it was very nice to be able to take a breather and come back during my spring break with a refreshed perspective and excitement to continue with the story! I'll try to get a schedule rolling with it, but I'm also working this week so no promises yet! For now, I hope you enjoyed this chapter! :)


	3. Replay

There’s a familiarity to the sound of a slamming door, and the rush of rage that boils and simmers up and down as Shizuo stomps across the floor.  It’s not exactly something he can say he enjoys, because he doesn’t—he hates violence, and anger, even as easily as it comes to him—but there’s an indescribable feeling of something known that is nearly comfort when Shizuo is angry, as he lets it show in his movements.

But even as he tries to let these thoughts sweep the present situation away from him, it doesn’t work.

“Fucking flea bastard,” Shizuo hisses, and watches with a sting of guilt as a young girl—a high schooler, maybe—gives a tiny yelp and jumps at Shizuo’s obvious rage coloring his words and motions.

He attempts an apologetic nod toward her, but the scowl on his face probably doesn’t give the gesture any justice.

So he continues walking—stomping, really—down the street back to his own home, so that there he might find more comfort to wipe away the bitter repeat of Izaya’s words currently echoing in his mind.

Even as he insists that it isn't getting to him.

He swears that the soulmate mark must be a mistake.  He hates Izaya, as he always has, and from the reaction he gave only a few minutes ago, it’s apparent that he hates Shizuo still, too.

Shizuo still refuses to give up completely on the idea that Izaya is pranking him, although he knows that Celty would never in a million years go along with it like she seemed to have done, assuming Shizuo’s theory were true.

And then there’s a rumble of sound from behind him, distracting Shizuo from his current stream of thoughts, and when he turns his head in vague curiosity, Celty is there as if on cue, riding Shooter toward him along the side of street.  She waves to him tentatively, gesturing to the alley up ahead of him, and Shizuo nods and speeds his pace minimally as Celty pulls into the dark of the side street.

_“Are you OK?”_

Shizuo scoffs.  “Yeah,” he says, feeling a bit of his immediate rage start to simmer already, in the presence of his long-time friend.  “Just needed to get out of there.”

Celty nods her helmet.  _“So…”_

“So?”  Shizuo frowns.

_“What are you going to do now, about Izaya?”_

Shizuo snarls.  “Nothing, I’m going to go back to trying to beat the shit out of him whenever I see him.”  Celty doesn’t move, so Shizuo adds, “There’s obviously no way he’s my soulmate.”

_“I don’t know about that.  You clearly saw a mark, right?”_

“Yeah, but I doubt it’s real,” he growls.  “Did you see how the bastard was acting?  He’s obviously just as disgusted with me as ever, and I’m just as disgusted with him.  We’re not soulmates.”

Celty’s shoulders drop, along with her head, as if she’s sighing.  _“You know how the soulmate thing works, Shizuo.  Marks don’t mean immediate love.  It won’t wash away any past feelings, either.”_

“Yeah but it still means that there’s some kind lingering, or else the whole system wouldn’t work.”

There’s a sound of a crash outside the alley, distracting both of them so that they turn to the root of the noise.  Two men stand picking up a large metal sheet.

Celty starts typing again before Shizuo turns his head away from the sight, so when he finally brings his attention back, the PDA is mere inches from his face.

_“You said you saw how Izaya acted, didn’t you?”_

Shizuo frowns.  “Yeah?”

_“Then you should’ve noticed that it wasn’t staged.”_

He tries to think back, but it only makes him start to tremble with anger.  “I don’t fucking know, he’s always staging shit, playing parts.  I assume he was this time too.”

_“But he was angry.”_

“And?”

_“Izaya doesn’t get angry when he’s acting.  Haven’t you noticed that?”_

Shizuo tries to summon up a memory of a time that he’s seen Izaya angry like that, but he can’t think of one.  “I guess not.”  He pauses, lets the idea of Izaya pulling an elaborate prank get tucked away in the back of his mind.  “But all that means is that he didn’t know anything about the mark.  Doesn’t mean there isn’t some mistake with us.”

Celty hits the backspace on her PDA multiple times, before beginning to type again.  _“How many cases of a mistake have you heard of, in all of mankind’s history?”_

Shizuo sighs roughly, and pushes a hand through his hair.  “He can’t be my fucking soulmate, I would rather ju-“

Celty pushes the PDA screen in front of Shizuo again, so forcefully and suddenly that Shizuo takes a step back, eyes wide.  Celty never cuts him off.   _“If it’s a soulmate mark, it’ll happen one way or another.  Do you want it to be more difficult than it already is?”_

“What is _that_ supposed to mean?” Shizuo huffs.

_“There’s no reason to avoid it.”_

Shizuo stares at the screen for a long time, not saying anything.  He reads over the characters again and again, until they start to look like anything but what they are.  Then Celty pulls the PDA away from his sight, and starts to type something else.

_“Go back and talk to him.  Or come back tomorrow.  Don’t wait for more fate stuff to take the reigns.”_

Shizuo sighs.  Now that he’s not so angry, he can see that she’s right.  He doesn’t exactly like the idea of seeing or interacting with Izaya again, but he likes the idea of fate controlling everything this situation even less.

“…Alright,” he says finally, after a long pause.  “I’ll go back now.”

\---

At first, Shizuo had waited in the living room, when Shinra had told him that Izaya was still asleep, and needed to rest.  But then he had gotten agitated with Shinra’s lightning-fast ramblings, and had stormed into Izaya’s room to get even the smallest semblance of peace and quiet in the presence of so many annoyances.

He had thought in the first few moments of his irritation falling that he had woken up Izaya with the slamming door, upon hearing a slight rustle of noise behind him, but when Shizuo turns around Izaya is still asleep, slight frown sticking almost sickly to his features.  Shizuo breathes out a lungful of air as he takes a seat in the chair on the right side of the bed, crossing his arms and trying his hardest to look anywhere but at his enemy.

After a while, though, his eyes end up sliding over to the patterned motion of Izaya’s sleep-lulled breathing, watching for a long span of minutes before feeling his eyelids drooping and his limbs going slack from fatigue.  He has a brief crystalline thought before he falls asleep that if he does Izaya can kill him, but it leaves him as soon as everything goes dark and warm.

Shizuo dreams, which is a much rarer occurrence lately than it has been in the past.

Izaya is there, he thinks, but he can’t see him.  He can sense that overbearing presence that is always there when Izaya is close, and he can smell a tang of blood and something sickly sweet, but less familiar as it is unnerving, for some reason that Shizuo can’t place for all the years he’s experienced the unusual in his hometown.

There’s a murmur of chatter beyond some pale-colored door that appears in the dream, and Shizuo wonders with creeping dread if the sound on the other side is Izaya speaking.

_Oh, right.  I was supposed to talk to Izaya, like Celty said._

He tries to open the door, but when he grasps nothing but air, he looks down and realizes that the handle is disappearing under his fingertips, keeping him trapped in whatever room he put himself in.

It still smells like blood, more so than the sweetness that was in the air a moment ago, and Shizuo has a speeding of his heart rate bring upon panic across the system of nerves currently keeping him grounded.  But then this uneasy feeling is replaced with comfort when at the corner of his eye he catches a hand hanging out of the window, covered in blood—that must be where the smell is coming from, he thinks—the wrist covered by a black imprint of the kanji to “shizu” in “Shizuo.”

It makes him feel safe, though a rational part of his brain tells him that there’s nothing safe about a bloody dismembered hand with the kanji to his name on it, and all at once Shizuo wakes up back in the room with Izaya.

Izaya is staring at him, and Shizuo blames the calm and comfort he feels at the sight on the dream.

\---

Shizuo slams the door behind him, and meets Shinra’s wide-eyed stare from where he stands at the counter in the kitchen.

“Uh-oh,” he says, as Shizuo huffs out air bitterly and moves around the corner to the door.

“So I take it didn’t go very well?” Shinra asks, following Shizuo to the door.

“No,” Shizuo cuts harshly, and quickly puts on his shoes and rests his hand on the door handle, trying desperately not to crush it.  He can feel the metal bending under his grip.  “He can drop dead for all I care.”

“Huh?” Shinra says, as Shizuo swings the door open wide and steps out.  “What happened?  Wait, Shizuo-kun!”

But Shizuo is already storming down the stairs, wanting to get as far away from Izaya as humanly possible.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Oof, I don't like this chapter... But I wanted to show what was happening with Shizuo while all this was going on, so I wrote it anyway. Sorry for the long wait, I've been so busy with school and such, and I'm going on a school trip soon so I've been having to plan for that, AND I'm taking the SAT soon, so I'm having to start studying for that lol. So chapters may be scarce for this fic, but I promise I'm still writing with it! Hope you enjoyed regardless of all this! :)


	4. Desperately Unyielding

Izaya doesn’t believe in having a soulmate.  He loves all of humanity, and therefore he considers all of humanity his soulmate—but these words are only ever formed if he is asked about the subject on a personal level.

He has never had much interest in the soulmate system.  Soulmates can’t be changed, and aren’t controlled by any human actions, and Izaya doesn’t like it.

His sisters claim that they have soulmate marks for each other on their lips, Mairu’s on her upper lip and Kururi’s on her lower lip.  Izaya thinks it’s just another part of their persona, but has never cared enough to spare much thought on the oddity.  Namie insists that her brother has half of her name on his chest, and when Izaya was told this the only reaction he had given was a hum and a slight grimace at the thought.

He had been only in middle school when a girl first confessed her “love” to him.  She seemed nice enough, but Izaya wasn’t interested in any human being romantically, and told her this with a sharp-edged mundane voice that he suspects only added to her pain of rejection.  The incident had been quickly swept away for the rest of Izaya’s day, and for the rest of middle school he was not confessed to by another girl.

When he made it to high school, Izaya was beginning to grow irritated by the chatter of soulmates that filled the hallway, accompanied by the plans of troubled second and third years to obtain fake IDs and find their way to speed flashing events.  He avoided all talk of soulmates by this point, and only tolerated it in the form of Shinra’s lamented voice when he spoke about his beloved Celty and how she was still pretending to not have felt the soulmate bond between them.

It was this that Shinra was talking about when they made their way to the soccer field where Izaya would first have a taste of hot-blooded denial.

It was impossible not to clap.  It was impressive—beyond so—and Izaya couldn’t help himself.  The boy was clearly a monster, but he was incredible, and Izaya had felt a dreaded start of adrenaline at the thought of the chaos he could cause in Ikebukuro if he had this boy’s strength.

He did not even notice the girl that was leaving the field.

But just as the boy was turning around at the noise, as Izaya’s gaze caught on the shift of his collarbone under his uniform shirt speckled with blood, the words rang out from the distance, and Izaya’s interest boiled into unyielding hatred.

It was as simple as that.

Despite his disinterest in soulmates, Izaya plays with the system’s idea occasionally.  When suicidal young girls meet up with him, one at a time, he trains his eyes on a random part of the girl’s exposed body, widens his eyes, and says with as much feigned shock he can muster without laughing, “You’ve got my name there.”

He’s constantly entertained by the reactions to these grossly untrue words.  Girls who were convinced there was nothing else in the world to live for, suddenly open to go on living for something as simple as a soulmate, whom they had just met.

Izaya always laughs bitterly when he tells them the truth, after their eyes have lit up and they have forgotten about the plan to kill themselves; but anyone who listens closely sees that his words don’t match his demeanor.

“If you kill yourself, it would be a shame that you would never be able to experience that joy when you meet your _true_ soulmate, don’t you think?”

The girl in front of him sneers, the light glint in her eyes turned fiery upon hearing the truth.  “It’s just as I thought before, I don’t _have_ a true soulmate.”

“Of course you would think that,” Izaya says, circling her, his hands still in his coat pockets.  “You’re only 19, and all of your friends have met their soulmates already.  Frustrating, but most people would feel happy for these friends if they were in the same position as you.”  The girl freezes.  “But you only feel hatred.  You’re jealous.  Your friends are undeserving of their soulmates, right?”

Her eyes widen and Izaya’s smirk goes wider.  “N-No, I-“

“You’re angry because you’ve done everything to find your soulmate, and your soulmate has done nothing to find you.”  He’s still circling her.  “And you thought the ultimate way to punish your soulmate for not finding you soon enough—unlike all of your friends—would be to kill yourself, and make them realize what they’d done.”

“I don’t _have_ a _soul_ mate-“

“But you do,” Izaya says, stopping in front of the girl and leaning close to her face.  “If you truly believed you didn’t, you would’ve called me a liar the moment I said I saw a mark on you.”

The girl blinks, her eyes wide but somehow keeping firm.  Izaya can see them start to waver as she lets the words echo in her head.

“You won’t thank me verbally, but I’ll take that face you’re making now as wordless gratitude,” Izaya says, his lips tugging into a brighter smirk that still doesn’t creep into his eyes.  He turns to the door, holding up a wave behind him.  “Good luck,” is all he says as he pushes against the door handle and steps out.

He nods to the owner of the shop as he heads out, but just as he’s pulling out his phone from his coat pocket to see what he’s been missing for the last several minutes, Izaya hears jolting footsteps behind him.

“Wait, Izaya-san!”  The girl is rushing to catch up to him, the heels she wore to her suicide clanking against the pavement.

Izaya frowns at the unexpected action as she stops next to him.

“Do you have a soulmate?” she asks, a feigned edge to her voice that tells him that she still wants him to believe she’s angry.

Izaya’s frown twists and he clenches his left hand into a fist around his phone, thinking of the mark he doesn’t believe he has on his wrist.

“No,” is all he says, and turns away from her again.

“Wait, Izaya-san,” the girl starts again, and Izaya speeds his pace to get away.  Her heels clank on the pavement.  “Don’t you want one?” she asks, as she steps in sync with him.

Izaya grits his teeth, and shoves his phone back in his pocket.  “No,” he repeats, with more edge.  “Humanity is my soulmate, I don’t need any single person to be one.”

“Oh,” she says, and Izaya can sense that there’s more still to come.  “But you don’t mind?”

“I enjoy it,” Izaya tells her, speeding his pace once more to shake her off.  “Now if you’ll excuse me-“  And then there’s a sudden swell of pain in his body—different from the kind from his still-fully-healing stab wound—cold and empty and strange enough to stop him in his tracks.

“Izaya-san?” the girl says tentatively, stopping behind him.

Izaya steps forward to test his ability to still move, and sure enough he can, the aching feeling subdued, but still there.

“I’ve got work to do,” he says without turning to the girl behind him.  “I don’t have time, unfortunately.”

“Oh,” she says.  “Alright.  Goodbye, then.”  She mumbles something else—a “thank you” maybe—but Izaya doesn’t really hear it.

He just nods, and begins walking again, the unfamiliar aching in his body following him all the way back to his apartment.

When he unlocks the door, Namie is there, hand outstretched to where the handle would be, her eyes wide on momentary surprise.

“You look shaken up,” she says, turning around and closing the door.  “Did she try to kill herself in front of you or something?”

“No,” he says, sitting down at his desk without bothering to take off his coat.  “No, it doesn’t have anything to do with her.”  He pauses, and looks up at her when he realizes what he’s saying.  “I’m not shaken up.”

“You look it,” she says, returning to where she had been sorting through papers.  “Then what happened?”

“Nothing,” he says, but he can still feel the near-gnawing sensation running all across his body.

“Maybe you shouldn’t have pushed yourself to go out so soon after being stabbed,” Namie offers, her voice stripped of any genuine care the words would usually give.

Izaya shakes his head.  “Work is work, my dear Namie-san,” he says, his voice feigning nonchalance.

“That wasn’t work, that was just your twisted way of having fun,” she retorts, snorting.

Izaya smirks.  “Well then, fun is fun.”

Namie rolls her eyes, but doesn’t say anything else about it.

The feeling doesn’t go away for the rest of the day.

\---

Three months pass since his stabbing, and the feeling still doesn’t go away.

Izaya has learned how to ignore it for short periods of time, giving it a place in the back of his mind during business meetings or inquiries, but can’t stop it when he’s just gathering information online or eating dinner.

He avoids Ikebukuro as much as possible, not willing to chance running into Shizuo for some cheap business that can be done on the outskirts of the district just as easily as in the heart of it.

And he’s here now, just leaving his new go-to meeting spot, spending a short amount of time simply walking nowhere, distracted by the off-feeling in his body once more.

He frowns as the sensation gets stronger as he steps farther, wondering for maybe the hundredth time this week why it hasn’t gone away after so long.

And then he looks up from the pavement, and Shizuo is there, staring at him from across the street like there’s nothing else in the world, like Tanaka Tom isn’t currently standing next to him waving a hand in front of his face.

Izaya momentarily panics, turning around and walking back the way he came, but then he hears Shizuo’s voice calling after him, and then there are footsteps, and Izaya falls back into the routine of their chases as if three months have never passed.

Shizuo chases him all the way back to Shinjuku, but as Izaya turns a corner into a darkened alley, he hears an attention-demanding shout behind him, and begrudgingly forces himself to stop.

“Izaya, wait!  I just want to _talk_!” Shizuo yells behind him, and though Izaya is aware that it could be a lie, he stops anyway, leaving deliberate distance between them, his switchblade still gripped tightly in his hand.

The aching hasn’t eased.

Shizuo breathes heavily for a while, hands on his knees, and Izaya notes how odd it is that the monster would have to stop to catch his breath.

“I just want to talk,” he repeats after a while, voice steadier.  He’s frowning, but it’s not the same anger Izaya is used to.  It looks more like frustration, but Izaya pushes the thought away to keep from wondering why.

“Then talk,” Izaya snaps.  “I don’t have all day.”

Shizuo growls, but complies anyway.  “We can’t ignore this,” he says, and Izaya sneers.

“Ignore _what_ , protozoan?”

“The _mark_ , Izaya, the _soulmate_ mark!” he growls, his voice lower as if to avoid catching strangers’ attentions, and Izaya grits his teeth.  “We _can’t_ just let it go.”

“Sure we can,” Izaya says bitterly.  “It’s a simple explanation really—we’re just one of those one-sided cases.”

“There’s only ever been _one_ of those cases ever documented in all of history,” Shizuo says, the edge of anger prominent now.

“Maybe we’re the second.”

“ _No_ ,” Shizuo says, so loudly and sharply that it catches Izaya by surprise.  “We can’t- There’s _obviously_ something going on.  I’ve felt weird for _months_ , like I’m missing something, and there’s no way it’s anything but something to do with the soulmate marks.”

Izaya freezes at the mention, the aching in his body flaring to the front of his mind once more.

“Maybe you’re just realizing that you’re going to be alone for the rest of your life,” Izaya tells him, refusing to capitulate to admitting having the same feeling.  “Maybe you should go to a speed flashing event to make yourself feel better, huh?”

“ _No_ , Izaya-kun, I’m not going to do that,” Shizuo growls, clenching his fists, but not moving to attack.

And then they’re quiet for a long time, the same oddness Izaya has been living with for months distracting him from forming a comeback.  Shizuo is still looking at him, as if he expects something, and Izaya is still holding his knife carefully and defensively, but it all seems unimportant as he realizes that there’s no way out of this.

“Just…” Shizuo starts, just as Izaya is beginning to think about running.  He sounds tired.  “We can just see.  If you’re right, then it doesn’t matter.  If you’re wrong, and we really are soulmates, then… we can figure it out.”  He doesn’t sound like he truly believes that it won’t matter.

“So what are you saying?” Izaya asks, suddenly feeling just as tired as Shizuo sounds.

“We should go on a date,” he says, fast.  “Or two,” he quickly appends, before Izaya can respond.  It’s overwhelming, with the ache and the mark he denies is on his wrist, and the look Shizuo is giving him that gives off no trace of the same anger as before all of this.  “Just to see.”

Izaya takes in a breath, feeling it tremble in his throat for a reason he refuses to even wonder.  _Go on a date with the monster._ He chuckles, shakes his head.  _Whatever._

“Fine,” is all he says as agreement.

Shizuo’s eyes widen into shock, and the near-pain in Izaya’s body burns out so abruptly that he stumbles backwards as if a weight has been dropped from his chest.  He grimaces at the obvious connection.

“OK,” Shizuo says, breathily, so quietly that from the distance that is between them it’s hard for Izaya to hear it.  “Um, then, tomorrow- er, I have work then… how about Thursday, 7 o’clock?”

The broken-worded plan is enough to make Izaya laugh deprecatingly in any other circumstance, but all he can do now is let his knife slide back into his pocket, and raise his hand to wave acknowledgement as he starts back toward the main street.

“Sure, monster.”

He doesn’t miss the way Shizuo’s gaze catches at the inside of his held-up wrist.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hello hello hello!!!!! Thank you for being so patient!! I've been so busy for the past few months and things are only getting busier, but I'm trying to jump back into this so I can get chapters out more regularly. I'm still really loving writing this, so even if there's another long no-chapter break, I'm going to be coming back to this. I'll see what I can do this week about writing another chapter or two, but for now no promises. Thank you again for supporting this and being patient, I hope you enjoy!! :D  
> ((Also, side note, I've gone back and edited the previous chapters, but none of the changes are too major!))


	5. Unbalanced

It starts raining on Thursday, in the part of the afternoon when Shizuo and Tom are just finishing their rounds and are getting ready to head back to the office.  Shizuo is distracted all day, and frowning more than usual, he suspects, by the way Tom is looking at him.  But the hindrance isn’t the same as it was before; it isn’t connected to the feeling of _missing_ that had hummed through his body for months before just a couple of days ago.

It’s more of something that Shizuo is wildly unfamiliar with, of what-will-I-wear and will-it-stop-raining-by-7 and did-I-really-make-the-reservation.  Shizuo thinks he’s never been so nervous in his life, and shakes his head as he grabs the collar of some lowlife owing money to the service, willing it to be only the threat of Izaya’s taunts and schemes that is making him so.

By the time they finish their rounds and are walking back to the office, they’re both soaked—Shizuo’s bartender outfit clings to his skin with contempt of its own and water runs off of Tom’s glasses as if they’re stand-ins for the windshield of a car.  All around them people are running under the cover of umbrellas and suitcases and backpacks and jackets, and Shizuo vaguely registers a young boy wearing a Raira uniform who slips in a puddle to his right.  They could easily move to the very inside of the sidewalk, so that the cover of awnings over storefronts might give them a little relief, but there are already enough people crowding those edges, so neither make a move towards it.

“Shizuo,” Tom is saying now, making Shizuo snap his head up from the worry still buzzing at the front of his mind.

“Huh?  What?” he attempts, huffing a little at the obviousness that he hasn’t been paying attention for a while.

Tom frowns as he looks at him.  “Are you alright?” he asks, his casual tone creeping into worry.  “I know you’ve been a little… out of it… for a while, but you seem different today.”

“I’m OK,” Shizuo tells him, and pauses as he ducks his head a little.  “Sorry for making you worry, I really am fine.”

“Nah, it’s alright,” Tom says, shoving his hands in his rain-drenched pockets.  Shizuo notices him grimace at the feeling.  “…Is it about Izaya?”  He says the last part carefully, his voice attempting to stay low even with the din of all the rain coming down around them.

Shizuo doesn’t know how to answer that.  Everything is about Izaya, all the time, and he knows Tom has this figured out just as well as he does.  But he takes a breath anyway, not bothering to think over his words before he lets them roll off his tongue.

“I have a date with him,” he says, and from the corner of his eye he can see Tom skip a step and almost lose his balance.

“You- You asked him on a _date?”_  Shizuo nods.  “And he said _yes?”_

Shizuo shrugs.  “I think it’s just, we both know at this point that there’s no reason to ignore it.  And I could tell he was feeling weird, too, even though he didn’t say it.  When he agreed to go out with me he stumbled back like a bunch of weight had lifted off him.  That’s when that pain I’ve been feeling stopped, too.”

“So, you think that pain-not-really-pain thing was because of the soulmate connection?” Tom asks, the edge of shock still recognizable in the roots of his tone.

“Yeah,” Shizuo says.  “It got stronger when Izaya walked past us the other day, too.  There’s no way it was just a coincidence.”

“Huh,” Tom says, speeding up as they approach the front of the office building.  “That does sound like they’re connected.”  Shizuo nods.  “So when are you meeting him?”

“Tonight,” Shizuo says, jogging away from Tom for a moment to grab the handle of the glass door and hold it open as Tom follows behind at the same pace.  “7 o’clock.”

Tom hums, looks at his watch.  “It’s already 6:45.  Are you going out to Shinjuku?”

Shizuo blinks.  “Oh, yeah, shit, I might have to take a taxi or I’ll be late.”

Tom chuckles.  “Might want to stop at home and change your clothes, too.”  Shizuo huffs, and starts to follow him as he makes his way to the elevator.  Tom stops him with his hand.  “Nah, I can handle the rest, go home and change.”  He’s grinning, and Shizuo suddenly feels thankful to him for maybe the millionth time in his life.

“Thanks, Tom-san,” he says, and starts back toward the door.

“Oh, and Shizuo,” Tom calls back, making Shizuo stop with his hand against the glass of the door, his head turning around without the follow of his body.  “Be careful, will you?  I know things are… different now, but it’s still Izaya, yeah?”

Shizuo knows.  It’s not as if the last almost-decade has dissipated under the weight of a single soulmate mark—the anger is still there, if somehow ebbing in the past months as he’s spent time mulling over the situation.  So Shizuo just nods without words and waves his gratitude as he slips out the door and back into the rain.

When he makes it home it’s already 7:08.  He swears as he throws off his vest jacket and fumbles around for his phone.  He calls Izaya instead of texting him.

 _“Shizu-chan,”_ Izaya says before Shizuo gets a chance to even say “hello.”  _“You’re already 10 minutes late.  Did you realize at the last minute that you hated me too much to spend even one night with me?”_ There’s an unusual edge to his voice but Shizuo ignores it for the time being as he continues to shake his wet clothes off, his phone held steady between his shoulder and ear.

“No,” Shizuo says, with a bit of an annoyed growl.  “But it was already 6:45 when we got back to the office and I just got home.”

There’s a pause and then a crackle of noise, and Shizuo imagines Izaya shifting where he sits.  _“And?”_

Shizuo frowns.  _“And_ I’m probably going to be even later getting down there, sorry.  I’ll take a taxi once I’m changed.”

Izaya pauses on the other line again, longer than before.  _“Don’t worry about it, I’ll come to you.”_

“What?” Shizuo blurts, the irritation falling from his voice all in one word.  He drops the first shirt he grabbed out of the closet.  “Why would you-“

 _“See you in 20,”_ Izaya says, and leaves the phone to beep with the end of the call in Shizuo’s ear.

There’s confusion forming of its own volition all across Shizuo’s thoughts, but he manages to drop his phone to the bed all the same and turn dumbly back to the rack of clothes in his closet.  He decides to leave the clothes for now and shower before going back out now that he has the spare minutes, and lets it go a little longer than usual to kill time.

He wonders vaguely as he’s just finishing buttoning his shirt if Izaya was joking, if Shizuo really should be dashing out the door right now to call a cab and get to Shinjuku as soon as possible.  But then there’s a knock at the door that makes him jump slightly, and doubt washes away immediately.

“Hi,” is all Izaya says when Shizuo opens the door.  There’s a soft dip to the word.

Izaya has a smirk on his face—the same one as always—but it flickers out of place as Shizuo looks at him.

Shizuo is staring—he knows it—but there’s a shine of water along the top of Izaya’s hair, droplets of rain scattered across the strands.  He has no thoughts at all as he lets his eyes wander the sight, and Izaya takes an unsteady breath and jolts Shizuo back to the present before he gets a chance to process anything into a coherent thought.

“Sorry,” Shizuo says.  “Uh, let me, uh, put my shoes on.”

Izaya ducks his head a little into a nod, and watches as Shizuo more or less stumbles into his shoes.  Shizuo notes how quiet Izaya is, but doesn’t say anything as he locks the door behind them and shoves his keys into his pocket.

“So I, uh, made a reservation at a restaurant,” he says as they start down the hall.

“What time?” Izaya asks, even though it was a perfect opportunity to hand Shizuo a snarky remark.

“Oh, uh, 7:15… Shit.”  Shizuo stares at his phone’s clock, at the taunting numbers of _7:36_ glaring bright at him.  His shoulders stiffen into stress.

This just makes Izaya laugh though, a short little burst of amusement that makes Shizuo stare at him wide-eyed.  In all the years that they’ve known each other, he’s never once heard Izaya laugh like that.

“Let’s go to an izakaya then,” he says, his smirk now something made softer by his laugh.  “It’s still raining anyway, and it’d be easier to find some place around here.”

“OK,” Shizuo says, putting his phone back in his pocket.  He ends up catching his gaze on the rain-shine atop Izaya’s head again and has to tear his eyes away.  “Where to, then?”

“I didn’t say anything about _me_ picking the place,” Izaya says.  _“You’re_ the one who asked _me_ out, Shizu-chan, you have to pick the place.”

Shizuo’s face warms despite the obvious truth to the words, and ducks his head to look at the mundane floor in front of him.  “Alright, well…”  He thinks for a moment, but can’t think of any izakaya near his apartment.  He frowns.  “I don’t think I know any around here, though.”

Izaya sneers a little, but it’s not quite as bitter as usual.  “You’ve lived here for how long and you don’t know a single izakaya around here?”

Shizuo shrugs.  “I don’t go out to eat much.”

Izaya doesn’t say anything to that, just pulls out his phone as they approach the stairs and types something into the browser, presumably looking up an izakaya.

“Don’t you know this city like the back of your hand?” Shizuo asks, watching him scroll through the search results.  Izaya looks up momentarily but continues scrolling.

“Yes,” is all he says.

“Then why do you need to _look up_ an izakaya?”

“Well,” Izaya says, locking his phone and putting it back in his pocket.  “I don’t spend that much time around your apartment complex, Shizu-chan, forgive me for not knowing the best eateries around the vicinity of your home.”

Shizuo rolls his eyes.  “Fine.  So where are we going?”

Izaya skips the last 3 steps of the stairs and jumps onto the flat pavement, new rain sprinkling into his dark hair.  “I told you, I’m not picking the place.”

Shizuo growls, for the first time tonight in Izaya’s presence.  He doubts it will be the last.  “Well I don’t know anywhere, so I don’t know what you expect me to-“

“But I _suppose_ I can walk you past an izakaya or two and you can decide if that’s where you want to take me or not,” Izaya cuts in, starting loud to overcome Shizuo’s growl.  He doesn’t look back at Shizuo as he starts to walk the sidewalk, but Shizuo can tell from the way he walks deliberately slow that it wasn’t as offhand of a remark as it seemed.

It takes Shizuo a moment to finally make his feet move and catch up to Izaya, accidentally leaning into him as he does so, as water pours down from the awning of the shop they’re passing.  Shizuo’s elbow bumps Izaya, making him stumble a little.

“Sorry, there was water coming down,” Shizuo huffs, quickly stepping away again.

“Can’t resist getting close to me so early in the night, Shizu-chan?” Izaya teases, smirking.  “And here I thought I would have to get you drunk for that.”

Shizuo flushes red, frowning a little in irritation, and keeps his distance.  Izaya laughs for the second time in one night.  It’s just as genuine as before.

When they find an izakaya, Shizuo walks toward it before Izaya even opens his mouth, and is glad for it so he can maintain his calm, as he asks for a table and watches from the corner of his eye as Izaya follows just barely a step behind him.

When they sit down Shizuo shrugs off his jacket, watching Izaya do the same in a more calculated fashion.  He notices that Izaya is shaking a little.

“Are you cold?” Shizuo asks.

Izaya looks up at him as if he had just been asked to murder someone.  “What?  No, not really.”

“You’re shivering,” Shizuo says, with a tiny laugh that ends up sounding more nervous than anything.  “I think you’re cold.”

“Well how astute of you,” Izaya snorts.  “Fine, I’m a little cold.”

Shizuo chuckles, but doesn’t know what else to say.  Things have seemed too calm, and he is only just now noticing.  He resists the urge to frown as looks down at the menu.

Shizuo orders a large array of kushiyaki for the both of them and Izaya orders gyoza for them and ramen for himself.  Neither of them order alcohol.

“You’re only going to eat kushiyaki?” Izaya asks, sounding slightly amused as he takes a sip of water.

“No,” Shizuo says, and makes a show of pausing.  “I’m also gonna eat gyoza.”

This makes Izaya laugh a little again.  Shizuo’s starting to really like the sound of it, and it makes him more than a little scared, enough to silence him for the next several minutes.

Izaya doesn’t say anything either, maybe feeling just as confused as Shizuo is, startled and on edge for how casual and comfortable everything has seemed between the two of them up until now.

Shizuo’s eyes end up wandering to Izaya’s exposed wrist, where the first kanji of Shizuo’s name is printed in that brilliant black.  He lets himself stare at it a little, until the waitress comes back with the gyoza and Shizuo jumps out of his distraction as Izaya thanks her and shifts the plate more to the middle of the table.

They still don’t speak as they chew through the dumplings, the silence between them being filled in by the chatter coming in from tables around them.  Shizuo sighs a little when he puts the last bite of his gyoza in his mouth.

“Having second thoughts?” Izaya asks, apparently having heard Shizuo’s sigh.

“Huh?  Oh, uh, no,” Shizuo says, clumsy on the words.  “No, not really.”

Izaya hums, seeming uneasy.

Shizuo clears his throat a little.  “I bet you, uh, probably go to a lot of izakaya for work, don’t you?”

“You realize the harder you try to make small talk the worse it is, right?” Izaya gives back, no sign of teasing in his tone or demeanor.

Shizuo sighs again.  “Yeah,” is all he says.

Neither of them speak throughout the meal, but somewhere in between finishing a quarter of the kushiyaki and even less of his ramen, Izaya orders an entire bottle of sake.

“What are you doing?” Shizuo asks with a bite on the words, frowning.  He remembers what Izaya said about getting him drunk and has a jolt of anger hit him.

“It’s not really much of an izakaya visit without alcohol, is it?”  Izaya raises his eyebrows a bit.  “And I’m not much of a fan of beer or whiskey, so sake it is.”

“But a _whole bottle?_ ” Shizuo asks.  “I don’t have that kind of money.”

“Don’t worry, Shizu-chan,” Izaya says, smirking a little.  “I’ll pay for it.”

The waitress brings the bottle almost immediately, and Izaya gets to pouring the glasses even quicker.  He fills both of the cups to the very top, and Shizuo has to lean over the table to sip the very top from it before picking it up.

“Jesus, don’t fill it up so much,” Shizuo says, a little annoyed.  He drinks the rest of the glass quickly, reluctantly enjoying the hum of the alcohol in his veins.  It’s good sake—probably the most expensive on the menu—and Shizuo is suddenly glad Izaya ordered it.

They end up drinking quite a lot—Shizuo more than Izaya—and finish the rest of their food in no time.

Shizuo steals from Izaya’s ramen bowl, newly found courage in the lightness he feels from the sake, and making conversation is suddenly much easier than it was before.  They talk about little mundane things—stupid things—but they talk nonetheless, laughing a little at every other thing and taking sips of sake in between.

Shizuo can generally hold his drinks pretty well, and isn’t drunk right now, but he’s at least tipsy—that much he can recognize—but he doesn’t for even a second consider the danger of it.  It’s not as if he’s fighting with Izaya right now, anyway, he thinks, and Izaya seems to be getting a little tipsy—if less than Shizuo—as well.

“Do you remember that day when I was sick in our second year?” Shizuo is suddenly asking now, as Izaya tilts his head back to swallow the remaining sake in his cup.

“You mean the time everyone thought you were going to finally drop dead from some kind of monstrous cold?” Izaya says, with a smirk curling his lips.  “Yes I remember.  You were pretty out of it all day, I’m still surprised your loving parents let you go to school at all.”

Shizuo chuckles.  “Yeah, I think I snuck out, actually.”

“What about it, though?” Izaya asks.

Shizuo blinks.  “Oh, nothing, I was just asking if you remembered it.”

“Oh,” Izaya says.  He’s almost finished with his ramen.  “Well, do you remember when Shinra tricked us into playing spin the bottle and instead of kissing me you threw some girl at me and said, ‘Here, that’s the new Shizuo.’”

Shizuo laughs, and doesn’t know why.  He would be angry any other time.  “Yeah, I do.  I feel bad for that girl.”

“Hm, I don’t think I feel as bad for her as I do the girl I told you had sworn she saw you at a speed-flashing event.”

“What?”  Shizuo drops his chopsticks.  “When was that?”

“Third year.”

Shizuo frowns, thinks for a moment.  “Did you really do that?  I don’t remember that at all.”

Izaya grins when Shizuo looks up.  There’s a mischievous sparkle in his eyes and Shizuo knows what he’s going to say even before he does.  “No, I didn’t, I just wanted to see if you would believe it.”

Shizuo just rolls his eyes.

When they’re finally finished eating and drinking they both pay for what they ordered and politely thank the waitress.  Izaya ends up giving the rest of the sake to Shizuo, and by the time they’re back in the street walking Shizuo feels warmer than he’s ever felt before in Izaya’s presence.

“I’ll just walk home now that it’s stopped raining,” Izaya is telling him now, as they stop next to Shizuo’s apartment complex.

“OK,” Shizuo says.  He suddenly wants to ask Izaya to come inside but decides he isn’t quite drunk enough to voice it.  “Can I walk you home?”  He settles for this instead, even though the probability is low and Shizuo is tired and both of them are too tipsy to probably have much fun with it.

“No,” Izaya says, just as Shizuo predicted.  “It’s too far.”

“Are you sure?” Shizuo asks, teasing bubbling up onto his tongue.  “I’d make an excellent bodyguard.”

Izaya laughs at this, bright and loud and not quite like before but better.  Shizuo’s breath rushes out of him at the sound, and he doesn’t know why what he said was so funny but it was, and Izaya is laughing, and there is alcohol buzzing in his veins, and all in one motion Shizuo leans in and slides his free hand into Izaya’s hair, pressing his mouth to Izaya’s as he’s still holding a smile as an aftertaste of his laughter.

He can feel Izaya go stiff against him, but after a second Shizuo feels his hand come up slowly and rest ever so lightly against Shizuo’s waist, as Shizuo slows the kiss and lets it go chaste and warm between the both of them.  Izaya is kissing back, and Shizuo can feel the hesitation in it, but it’s barely there, and they kiss for as long as they can before Shizuo has to break away to gasp a breath he didn’t even realize he needed.

Izaya’s eyes are still closed when Shizuo tilts his head back to look at him, and when Shizuo’s hand slides down to his neck his eyes flutter open, his tongue comes out to lick his lips.  His gaze swings down slowly to the neck of Shizuo’s shirt, left open under the heat of the izakaya, and Shizuo just barely registers the way Izaya’s eyes go wide and his hold on Shizuo stiffens.

Shizuo is just about to lean in and kiss him again when Izaya’s hand drops from his waist, the loss semi-startling as the touch had become warm from how long they were standing there together.  But Shizuo doesn’t get to say anything before Izaya takes in an unsteady breath and steps back and away at the same time, his eyes still trained on the collar of Shizuo’s shirt.

Shizuo’s outstretched hand falls away to his side, and there’s a frown forming as he starts to ask what’s wrong; but Izaya doesn’t give him the chance, just turns abruptly and rounds the closest corner quickly, his feet slipping a little as he does so.

If Shizuo wasn’t so abuzz from alcohol and kissing Izaya alike, he might have realized what had just happened.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hello again!! Thank you for being so patient! Summer has turned out to be a lot more busy than I was anticipating... Which isn't really a bad thing, I've actually had a lot of fun, but it also means I haven't had much time or energy to write or edit. I'm currently still studying for SAT and ACT tests coming up so I can't promise when this will get updated again, but I won't be abandoning this!! Hope you enjoyed :) (Also I hoped you guys liked how long this was?? I don't usually write chapters this long!)


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